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Voices

The following represent a random sampling of voices from those activists and organizers who participated in our research project. To see more, refresh this page.  Use the tag cloud to the right to navigate by theme.

Moving past guilt

I25

I think that's a bigger barrier, getting past the idea of guilt and that's one that I personally face a lot is getting past the idea of, ‘oh, I feel I've done enough today because I did this and this so I don't feel guilty anymore.’ It shouldn't be about that, it should be about working towards a real vision that's clearly articulated and you can measure your progress towards that rather than just measuring your progress in terms of how good you feel about yourself.

Means and ends

I8

You have to decide before your action, what is my end result? What do I want to achieve? Do I want to engage the masses and try and change them or not? Because if it's not, then hell yeah, do whatever you gotta do. But if you want to play it this way then violence won't play.

A liberated society

I12

I guess an anarchist society would be a society with the ability to choose your own options, and your own freedoms, and your own lifestyle without having to basically grow up with a set of options that are provided for you...by society. You have very few avenues to go [down] right now. You can either go to school, you can go to trades, you can be homeless, there are very rigid options that we're provided [with] and if you don't conform...it's a struggle.

Grassroots organizing

I14

I don't think you can be a socialist on your own. You can hold all the theories, you can believe everything that I agree with, but you're not going to be a socialist until you're actually working and also meeting folks in the labour movement, or childcare workers who make $10 an hour, or the crosswalk guards who just got organized, it really just changes your perspective about what the left needs to do to reach the mass of people because way too often I feel we're stuck in universities and academic settings.

Everyday winning

I21

You know what [winning] looks like for me? [It] looks like my life. My life if my kids were around me…[I’ve] got a place to live, little garden, a guaranteed annual income because I'm on a pension now, time to engage in conversation, time to be with friends and family, time to go for a walk on the beach, time to listen to some music. I think my life is so privileged except for what capitalism has done to take my sons away from me, which is an economic and social phenomenon. What capitalism has done is to make me lonely.

Violence and radical social change

I11

I like expressions of violence. Expressions of violence inspire me and feel sincere to me where other expressions of anger don't, they lack something. So I like to see places get windows broken and fires...started but [they’re] mostly...an expression of anger…[they’re] not...the violence that is going to bring down the state.

Reproducing violence

I20

One of the things...I saw a little bit while working in other countries that had had big revolutions, like Cambodia for example or some Latin American countries, is sometimes the revolution is as frightening as what was there before. It may change the power...but it doesn't seem to change what happens to people in terms of violence in their day to day life [or allow better] access to the things that they fought for. So I guess some element of me is as leery of what we will do in the name of change...

Popular education and action

I10

Before getting people to act you need to educate them and then you need to incite some sort of emotion in them. Those are vague but that happens just with grunt work like posters, discussion nights, talk nights, showing movies, making it on people's radar...people need to be reminded of issues of social and environmental justice as much as we're being reminded that we need to buy Blackberry.

Marginality and denial

I2

More and more I see an obsession with state repression and class power [as an avoidance tactic].....If you're framing those themes as separate [from] race and gender and sexuality, what's up?...It's either an avoidance or a direct minimization of those experiences which is appalling and no wonder you're marginal because you're denying the reality of the majority of people.

A world without rape culture

I11

I try and imagine a world without rape culture sometimes and it's pretty exciting.

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What Moves Us: The Lives and Times of the Radical Imagination

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